f you were a kid who grew up in Castle Hill projects, then you were the luckiest kid in the Bronx. We moved to Castle Hill when it was brand new in
April of 1960. We had panoramic view of Manhattan from our seventeenth
floor apartment. We felt the vibration of low flying jets as they passed by on
their way to LaGuardia, which we could see from our window too. We could
see both the Throgs Neck and the Whitestone Bridges, which at night
reflected on the Long Island Sound. The new Projects were beautifully
landscaped with a star-shaped flowerbed in the front of our building and a
circular-shaped one in the back. This was before they covered the back
flowerbed with blacktop and put in stone benches and checkerboards. Not
too long after we moved into Castle Hill, the Throgs Neck Bridge opened. A
guy on a bike was the first one to cross it. The senior citizens and young
mothers would sit out in the back with their carriages and become
acquainted while watching their children and grandchildren play.

To my brothers and me, that tiny three-bedroom apartment in 635
Castle Hill Avenue was a palace. Our mom was a housewife like most of the
moms who lived there. She kept that place immaculate. Roaches? Nah, not
in our apartment. Mom had the cure. Confectioners sugar and boric acid
was her antidote, and it worked. In the mornings, Mom would walk with us
along Olmstead Avenue to P.S. 138 and turn onto Lafayette Avenue and
later have lunch ready for us when we got home. Yeah, in those days you
could go home for lunch. Most of our friends had large families so you
usually ended up attending school in the same class with someone’s younger
or older brother or sister.

We remember our neighbors, .the Greenbaums, Brookmans, Wax’s,
Keplers, Fazios, Jaffes and Ferraras We remember the milk deliveries from
the dairy on Hermany Ave. Milk was delivered in glass bottles then and
nobody stole them. One morning, when one of the bottles broke in the
hallway, our neighbor Mrs. Greenbaum opened the door to help us clean it
up. That was when we met our best friend Fay. Our friendship has lasted
more than forty years. It was truly a community where everyone knew and
respected one another.

In our neighborhood, there was Food Fair, McCrory’s, a bakery, the
Chinese laundry, the dry cleaner, liquor store, the Deli and the pizza place
across the street on Castle Hill between Randall and Cincinatis. At the
“Luncheonette” you could get an egg cream, floats, candy, comic books and
newspapers. A twenty-five cents allowance got you two candy bars, the
latest Marvel comic and three Bazooka Joe bubble gums. The Castle Hill
library under Food Fair was the place where everybody would meet to do
homework or to meet boys or girls.

Most of all, we remember the fun we had in the summers in Castle Hill.
We didn’t take many family vacations since our Dad was busy coaching the
Castle Hill softball team. We didn’t mind because Dad would take us on
family picnics, and he gave us the time we needed with him and that was
enough for us. Some of the team used to hang out in our apartment and
play cards. We remember a favorite card game was “Fan Tan”. We don’t
remember much about how to play it but it certainly caused a lot of laughter
and fun. Neil Berger was there all the time. We sort of adopted him
because he practically lived with us. He was Dad’s assistant coach who just
loved hanging out in the Harris apartment. Neil has been our brother and
son for over 30 years. The O’Garro sisters, Noel Twins and Terry Hill and
my sister would visit each other and listen to Motown, do our hair, learn the
latest dance moves, talk about other neighborhood girls and eat. We didn’t
do much talking on the phone other than setting up a rendezvous place and
time. The O’Garro sister’s lived in 2140 Seward and Mona loved going there
because they always had snacks. Fay would hang out with us in the
evenings since she was busy with dance lessons and other artsy stuff during
the day. Since there was no air conditioning, on hot nights the windows were
open, and we even slept with the front door open to get a cool breeze from
the hallway. As kids, we would run up and down the staircase playing tag,
go out onto the roof (which was twenty stories high) on hot summer nights,
and just enjoy the fun of being a kid in the sixties.

All the tenants on each floor shared the terrace. It became our private
domain and clubhouse and we would challenge anyone who came to our
floor uninvited to play. Another cool thing about the terrace was that it had
vents against the fencing through which you could call down or up to the
terraces on the floors above and below you. It also had little indentations or
coves where you could hide out. The terrace was our own field of dreams
since we played every sport imaginable. When it was locked in the winter,
we would climb in through the window of the terrace and have snowball
fights or, for those of us more daring, we would steal our parents’ cigarettes
and sneak a smoke on the terrace. Another winter memory was one of our
neighbors in the building - Joanna Dentico – who played organ and piano
and around Christmas time would set her organ close to her living room
window and play beautiful Christmas Carols, which could be heard for
blocks.

The playground behind our building on Randall Avenue between Castle
Hill and Olmstead was another world unto itself. It had a sand box,
basketball courts, handball courts, monkey bars, skelly, hopscotch and the
sprinklers. It had a “park house” with bathrooms and the “Parky” would give
out balls and games for us to play, while he and his friends would play
pinochle inside the park house.

The playground is where we learned to play Ring-a-leeveo, Red Rover,
freeze tag, paddle ball, stickball and of course basketball. The playground
had a pecking order: older kids got first dibs on the courts. Even if you were
in the middle of a game, when the older kids came on the court, you had to
leave; that was the unwritten rule of the playground. Summers in the
playground were filled with laughter and music from different radios playing
WABC (top 40) or WWRL-AM, (Motown and R&B) depending on your taste in
music. Our curfew was when the streetlamps came on or when Mom would
raise the shade in the kitchen and announce that it was time to come
upstairs. Mr. Softee, Bungalo Bar, The Good Humor Truck and of course
“Al’s Truck” keep us fed and cool with ice cream, soda’s, ices and all kind of
sugar laden treats. Now that we are older with our own children and the
responsibilities that come with middle age, we often wish we could go back
in time to a simpler time of our youth in the Castle Hill Projects.